Politics

Roads Congested as Lunar New Year Holiday Winds Down

With the five-day Lunar New Year holiday winding down, major roads were congested on Saturday with millions of people traveling home after meeting with their families.

The Korea Expressway Corporation said that over 460-thousand cars would travel to the capital Seoul and its surrounding metropolitan region just on the fourth day of the holiday alone. Around 270-thousand were expected to leave the Seoul metropolitan region during the same day.

The highway authority predicted that the traffic volume would peak on Saturday afternoon before easing around midnight. It estimated that driving the 415 kilometers from the southern port city of Busan to Seoul would take almost six hours on Saturday afternoon, or about an hour and a half longer than usual.

Driving 240 kilometers from Gangneung, an eastern city, to Seoul is estimated to take around four hours and ten minutes as of Saturday afternoon, much longer than the usual two hours and forty minutes.

The expressway corporation said a total of over 18 million vehicles would be out on the road throughout the holiday with about 70 percent of the nation's population forecast to be traveling to celebrate one of the nation’s biggest holidays with their relatives.

An official of the traffic authority said that the traffic situation worsened due to the drizzling rain in many parts of the country.